Sam Michalski

Artemis is a novel written by Andy Weir in 2017, the author of the acclaimed novel, The Martian.  The setting is lunar rather than Martian, but otherwise it’s basically the same pitch.  Artemis itself is a five-dome moon base, servicing a little heavy industry and rather more tourism.  Jazz, our heroine, is a sparky young woman who, while her observant Muslim father tut-tuts, gets drunk, has sex, and generally tries to have a good time.  It’s a struggle, good times are expensive on the moon, and despite supplementing her job, with some judicious smuggling, Jazz is always short of money.  She lives in a coffin-sized apartment, shares communal washing facilities, and eats the cheapest algae-grown gunk.  Poverty persuades her to take on a criminal commission, a little light sabotage on the lunar surface.  Naturally, things don’t go smoothly.  She botches the sabotage, her employer gets murdered, and an assassin is coming after her.  The moon has become a battleground for organized crime over a MacGuffin, in this case a new tech that could revolutionize Earth’s entire communication system.

What makes Artemis interesting is what made The Martian so special; Andy Weir brings to the science fiction genre boundless passion for science. He combines passion with a gift for making it entertaining and easy to understand.  His science fiction is every bit as much science as it is fiction, giving it extraordinary authenticity.  Andy Weir helps to bring our imaginations to life, his writings are every bit as fantastical and colorful as our minds can travel.  He continues to bring his works to life and bring our ideas about life in space to reality.

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.  Well, sort of.  Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire.  So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right?  Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.  Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.  But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she’s stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.

Yet again Weir has brought an amazing piece of art to the table.  In The Martian Weir describes the life of an astronaut stranded on Mars.  Mark Watney an astronaut on the Ares 3 mission to Mars. This mission has to be aborted in a massive dust storm, in which Watney is stuck with a piece of a satellite and lost in the dust storm.  Ultimately, his crew leaves him on Mars, believing him to be dead.  This novel was just the beginning of an amazing journey for Weir and his writings, The Martian was written in 2011.  Artemis was published in late November 2017, continuing Weir’s legacy of incredible science fiction fantasy.

Artemis, does repeat The Martian’s formula in other ways, other than just a fantastic space journey.  Once again, Weir has set an action-adventure in space, where a resourceful protagonist improvises scientific solutions to escalating dangers.  The brisk pacing and reader-friendly explanations of chemistry and engineering conundrums are similar.  And for better and worse, the protagonist’s snarky, hipshot, goofy voice is much the same as Mark Watney’s in The Martian.  In many ways Weir has brought similar ideas to both novels, but that being said there are also many differences in the stories.  Jazz, our protagonist, breezes through the narrative with paper-thin characterization, periodically reminding us that she is a woman of Saudi Arabian descent, but without otherwise distinguishing herself in any meaningful way from the hero of The Martian.  She goes through her heist without a single second of it feeling surprising or remarkable, accompanied by the types of characters who traditionally help out the hero during a heist: the lovably nerdy tech dude, the money, the muscle.

There are some critics who have shot down Weir’s second novel, some say that it is amateur and too similar to that of his first. Some critics believe that Jazz and Mark Watney, from the first book, are too similar to be in separate novels. Others say that it is a complete change of pace from Watney in The Martian. While others still say that the novel is written choppy and poorly.

I personally believe that is a masterpiece of fantasy and space and science fiction in general.  I also believe that people come to a work of literature in many different ways, everyone comes to a text with their own baggage and their own interpretations in mind.  This leads to everyone having their own likes and dislikes, so yes of course there will be critics that do not like how a book is written or what it is about.  It is normal and natural for that to occur.  I do believe that Artemis is a novel worth reading, especially for those of you who enjoy space and crime, it is a perfect mix of the two.  Andy Weir did a wonderful job of combining two seemingly different genres, in my opinion.